Patna: Environmental issues have become one of the key matters for Marxism in the time of globalisation, said a professor from Japan on Tuesday at the international conference marking the bicentenary of Karl Marx's birth.

Kohei Saito, associate professor at the Osaka State University in Japan, said the destructive side of capitalist production such as degradation of forests, global warming, disrupting of nitrogen cycle and extinction of species had made ecology one of the central fields of Marxism.

Saito delivered the Gyorgy Lukacs Memorial Lecture on "Marx and Engels: The intellectual relationship revisited from an ecological perspective" at the conference organised by the Asian Development Research Institute.

He maintained that Marx was conscious of the danger of serious global disruption in the inter-dependent processes between "social metabolism" - production, circulation and consumption - and the natural world, but western Marxism never developed a Marxist critique of ecology.

Saito also said capitalist production could not fully take into account the complex dimensions of the social and natural metabolism, and only cared if accumulation could be achieved.

Roberto Massari, president of the International Che Guevara Foundation, Italy, delivered a lecture on "Che Guevara and Marx", tracing the Cuban revolutionary's journey from medicine to communism.

He said Che was a harsh critic of the new economic policy of the erstwhile Soviet Union and his book on the subject was kept secret till 2006. "Che maintained that we cannot advocate violence against those who speak against us," he said.

Elvira Concheiro from Mexico, Michael Brie from Germany, Shapan Adnan from Oxford University, and Ramaa Vasudevan from Colorado State University also spoke at the conference on Tuesday, the conference's penultimate day. Five papers were also presented.